Realisation
by TheRimmerConnection
Summary: A story that needed to be told. A brief extract from Quandary phase from Ford's POV. That tricksy little moment for FordArthur shippers when Ford doesn't seem to give a damn any more. Sad. Sorry.


_This is particularly for anybody who tends to stop listening just before the end of the Quandary Phase, who finds Mostly Harmless almost impossible to remain emotionally intact enough to read or listen through. This isn't about that, but it's about that feeling, or its close cognate. I apologise for writing angst when I sat down to write humour, but I've always felt that this side of the story needs telling somewhere along the way. I think you're all probably aware that I don't actually own these lovely, lovely people, because, much as I like her, the girl in question would never have got a look in, even though she makes Arthur so happy I want to hug her. No. They belong to Douglas Adams of course, or at least, to the people who got his hand-me-downs. I am just borrowing them. All the spoken dialogue comes from Episode Four of The Quandary Phase - i.e. it's not my own.  
_

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Do you know – have you ever felt - that terrible feeling when you suddenly realise that you have just lost somebody forever? 

For me, it started around my knees. I was sitting down at the time, which is just as well, because I didn't realise that my knees were no longer with me for a minute or two.

I had been sitting there for a while. In fact, I'd been asleep there for quite some time before I was woken up and made to pay attention, sort of. I was having fun, even though I felt like I'd just done the Sirius C to Clerheusian 8 run, five times in succession and lost six hours sleep every time. I'd been recounting my most recent hike, my most recent triumphs over the lowest of the low of the Galaxy, my heroic stand against the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. He wasn't listening, or so he told me afterwards, but he was there, pottering around like he always does, and it took me back years. I have spent so many nights on this sofa. I have woken up so many times with my arms hanging over the edge of it, dribble snaking its way down one of the cushions from the corner of my mouth, and always, he would come in as I woke, or maybe it was his clattering around in the kitchen that woke me, and he would have a cloth, and he would tut at me and pull on my shoulder, sitting me up so that he could wipe the drool off the velour. And he would look at me with an expression that meant, I worked out after a long time, that he wanted an apology, or at least an offer of help. Well zark it, I usually felt like hell. You can't really blame me for never having made the effort to..well, do anything.

Something in my mind was clicking round, from when he finished messing around getting coffee and muttering to himself, and came back to talk to me. For some reason, he was a little irritable with me at first. He seemed to think that my re-creations of my exciting adventures had been a little excessive. He said I'd wrecked some of his furniture - the man has no sense of proportion. And yet... He did listen. He became calm, more calm than I'd have expected, given the warning tone in his voice when he first appeared. He was asking questions, as usual; the same, inane questions he always asks, the same incomprehension on his face, the inability to take in the facts on the first telling, the same outrage at things that just don't warrant the emotion... But he wasn't getting all het up. We reached the point where I usually expect him to go all excitable, furious even, on me: start that frantic bobbing, up and down on his heels, his arms gesturing wildly in front of him, his eyebrows raised to his hairline, his mouth gaping like a babel fish. It's the time he tells me that I am making no sense and I sigh because I know I'm going to have to start explaining all over again, right from the top, but I don't really mind because it is so endearing watching humans try to work things out. I think it's what Zaphod's never really got the hang of, the waiting for their minds to work around to what you're saying. But this time he didn't have the same...I don't know...the same _force_ behind his protests. He was placid, calm, relaxed in a soul-searingly deep way. And it hit me just as I was preparing myself to start again: He was In Love.

And I asked him, almost told him. 'Are you in love?'

At this point, the attack on my knees was already under way. It had been there since my subconscious had worked it out, but it wasn't until I heard his reply that I realised, and I thanked Zarquon that I was sitting down.

'Yes, as a matter of fact,' he said.

Anyone who knows me will know that I am not one to be easily shaken by...by personal stuff. I'm a good hitchhiker. I keep travelling. I have friends, oh yeah, plenty of friends, all over the place. Contacts, you might say. But I don't have to think about any of them. It's like, if I run into them, it's great, we'll have a few drinks, do the mulling over old times thing. If it's someone like Zaphod, I'll roll them for what I can get, pick up all the advantage I can, but then when it's time to go, I'll go, and I won't look back. After all, there are billions of beings in this galaxy, about half of whom are good for a pleasant night in the bar. Why lumber yourself with a set of obligations that tie you down and give you an ache in your stomach when you're halfway across the galactic disc? Every man for himself is the answer really. Most humans don't like it, they say it's selfish, and so it is, but selfishness keeps you alive and sane, and those are two states I value in my personal life.

But somehow, at some point, I've come unstuck. My rule for an easy life has been broken. And I didn't even spot it happening.

It's amazing, just a couple of hours ago hope was still alive. I didn't recognise it because it's not something I've ever spent time thinking about. Through the whole...what is it? ten? fifteen? years that I've known him, it's just been the same as any other friendship...or that's what I thought. I mean, I was stuck with him longer than I usually get stuck with anyone. When we were back here, on Earth when I first knew him, it was convenient to hang around with him. He had a sofa for a start, and he didn't mind spending all his evenings down the pub, and he didn't mind me coming back to his place when I'd been to the pub on my own to take advantage of his sofa...or at least, he didn't protest vehemently enough to stop me doing it. He could talk about girls and drink if I made him, but he was happy to listen most of the time. Why wouldn't I have stuck with him while I was stuck here? Then the Earth was blown up and I took him with me. Of course I did. He had been around for so long, I couldn't imagine not taking him. It never occurred to me at the time that I would never have run the risk that I ran to save him for anybody else I had ever met. Take someone like Roosta. I count him as a friend, but put me on an exploding planet and I'd get the photon out of there and never give a thought to whether or not he'd make it out. Perhaps it had something to do with helplessness – humans being so hopelessly incompetent when it comes to space travel, but nothing would have induced me to leave him behind, and so I was stuck with him for even longer. And I didn't know why.

I am a really froody guy. I know I am. I am related to Zaphod Beeblebrox in a variety of inexplicable ways, and whether there's any genetic froodiness on the go there or not, knowing that you've got that to live up to in the family does at least give you a very competitive spirit where hoopiness is concerned. Nobody is ever going to out-cool Zaph – not while he has breath, but I like to think that I can give him a run for his money on a good day. So when I heard the confirmation of my suspicions, I kept my cool. He cannot possibly have known that just as my knees revealed their jelly-like state, a tight, cold sort of feeling ran into my stomach and through every nerve in my body. It's what he calls adrenaline. He says it makes him feel peculiar when something a little difficult happens, like being chucked out of a spaceship without a spacesuit, or finding yourself on board a spaceship that's diving into a sun. To give him credit, I have noticed that he has gained in confidence quite considerably since I first knew him. I think the time he spent on his own on prehistoric Earth gave him a bit more independence, or maybe it was just annoyance? Anyway, whatever it was, it gave him the ability to get along in the galaxy on his own, and it gave him a little more foolhardiness than is strictly good for a hitchhiking being. He called the Magrathean 'Slarti' for zark's sake. Even I'd look askance at a human doing that, and the gentleman in question has enough years behind him to work up a sense of outraged dignity for that sort of thing.

That's irrelevant to my tale however. I was explaining about adrenaline. It makes your mouth go dry. Or so he says. It gives you that feeling in your mouth that mimics almost exactly the feeling just before you realise that you really are going to throw up. I had that feeling. but I didn't show it. The most exact scientific meters could not have registered a pause in my response. I gave him what he wanted to hear. That is, I gave him the response I would have given to anybody, absolutely any other being in the entire universe, never mind this particular galaxy. I said,

'With someone who knows where the gin bottle is? Do I get to meet her?'

And then she came in, and it made sense. She was just the sort of girl I would have picked out for him. Normal, but only in the sort of way that most humans would describe as pretty much a weirdo; obviously intelligent – for a human, that is; attractive to someone who looks at the world like he does; friendly, the sort of girl you could have a chat with while you were waiting for the bus, without feeling that she might be sizing you up for a date or a profitable claim of assault.

And he looked at her, and I could see in his eyes that this was It.

And I rallied before he could sense I'd slipped, though maybe she spotted it, and I said something I know he probably classed as unforgivable, but I couldn't help myself – I had to let off a bit of tension somehow, I said,

'Hi. Where's the gin? What happened to Trillian.'

I knew I'd hit home immediately. But he couldn't say I hadn't asked the important question first. I mean, the whereabouts of the gin had just become doubly important. My head was swimming, my hands shook. If ever I needed a drink...But the bit about Trillian hit its mark. It threw him. Granted, he didn't seem as concerned as I would have liked at the time, but he changed the subject at lightning speed, and I knew he didn't want to talk about her, he wanted to talk about the self-assured girl currently passing for a delightful trophy in his living room. So I dragged Trillian's name back into the conversation to try to get a better rise. He didn't take the bait. He was so zarking content that he just accepted the dig and let it pass for an innocent question.

I could still have done it then, even then, I could still have thrown away his chance for him, pulled him down into this cold shaky pit into which my body seemed to have been thrown, but I suppose my heart wasn't really in it. Zark it, I _wanted_ him to be happy. Then the girl spoke, and I found myself in the presence of a determination I couldn't face down, and I knew I was lost. She knew what she wanted, and she asked, and she got.

'Did you arrive on that spaceship?' she said.

'Certainly did,' I replied, with all the casual arrogance I could muster,

'Can you get us on board?' she asked.

If I hadn't nodded; if I hadn't given in to her confidence; if I hadn't affected nonchalance and total cool to such an extent that I'd almost fooled myself; then, perhaps, I could have left, and never thought about him again...perhaps.

However, thinking about it rationally, I never would have done it. I will always keep coming back, because one day the horrible feeling that I have lost him forever might just go away. I will look into his eyes one day across a pub table somewhere, and I will not see that light that shines for someone else any more. Then I will start living again, start working and never stop until the light shines again, for_ me_. Then the cold empty feeling will go, and the butterflies I never noticed before, or passed off as space-sickness will come back, and the numbness currently protecting my brain will lift, and my knees will shake for a different reason.

Until then, I will be a really hoopy guy, albeit one for whom the bottom of the universe has fallen out, and act my life away.

...But I have this terrible feeling that I have just lost Arthur for ever.

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_Any and all reviews much appreciated, and I promise I'll try for something a little less melancholy next time ;-) (and don't forget towel day coming up on the 25th May - wear your towel with pride!)_


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